I think any experienced instructor or professor recognizes a rigorous course, when s/he teaches one. On the other hand, what counts as rigorous to our stu- dents may be different from what counts as such to us. After more than a decade teaching, I am still surprised, for example, when I receive student evaluations for a couple of my lower-level writing courses that laud the depth of class dis- cussions—especially given that I still find the work we do in those courses to be stilted and frustrating, as I struggle to accurately assess and to push my students’ engagement in them. Consequently, for my part, I think it wise to have taught a few upper-level courses in self writing before introducing the concept in a lower-level writing course. That way, you can figure out where you’re going, so to speak, in the larger writing curriculum, what you want students to be able to manage in a captstone self writing course, and you can work back from there to help them to that end. For example, after trying out self writing twice in upper level creative nonfiction courses (a 300-level and a 400-level), I began teaching a unit of self writing, using primarily the works of Seneca as models, in our introductory-level personal essay course. I found that at least a few students in the course seemed to “get it” and were invested in the practices; in fact, they continued with the curriculum. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I am offering insights about, a framework for, teaching materials for, and student essays from upper-level personal essay courses that center in the practices of self writing almost exclusively.
Obviously, the two most important practices in a self writing course are read- ing and writing. Both practices, though, must enable meditation—not simply reading for content or writing to argue for a particular interpretation of a text or for a particular perspective on an issue. Again, this is one of the reasons why an upper-level course in self writing works well: by the time they take the course, students have likely already progressed in their reading capabilities beyond the practice of simply reading for comprehension. Too, I find that I don’t have to sell them on the value of writing-to-explore an idea. They are generally open to, excited about, the prospect of writing-to-explore, instead of writing-to-argue. My job, then, becomes one of raising their awareness of the reading and writing practices they already participate in, amplifying any meditative practices that might work in those reading/writing practices, and pushing them beyond their limits—in particular, the limits that have been imposed by our course curric- ulum and by the core-beliefs that mark the boundaries between student and
scholar. In order to accomplish all of this work, I use three strategies: 1. I ask self writing students to read demanding and difficult texts; 2. I ask them to practice an intensified reading-writing relationship; and 3. I ask them debate with me (to affirm and to challenge) the concepts and claims rendered in the texts they read and produce.
As such, I have upper-level essay students read difficult, contemplative, even polemical works—works that are generally reserved for the experts, for scholars. Notably, these are works that are not chosen according to their canonical value or according to whether they will turn up on the GRE. Too, I don’t have them move through those texts in a single day or in a week, like we do in our literary theory course or in our upper-level rhetoric and writing course. Instead, we take such texts at about ten pages per class period—and sometimes (especially when we are reading Nietzsche) much less, e.g., 2-3 pages per class period. We also return to those texts repeatedly, throughout the course of the semester. In short, I don’t worry about how much they are reading in these courses; I worry about how they are reading. In reading such texts at a much slower pace, students learn to read like scholars, to take their time with the texts, to struggle through them, to focus (like scholars do) on a single word or phrase for as long as it takes for them to make that word/phrase do some work for them.
I want for my students to mimic the deliberate and attentive reading practic- es of scholars, but in order to explain what deliberateness and attentiveness look like, I point to imitation practices in the ancient world. Of reading, Quintilian states, “For a long time, too, none but the best authors must be read, and such as are least likely to mislead him who trust them; but they must be read with atten- tion, and indeed with almost as much care as if we were transcribing them […]” (129; book X, ch. 1, sec. 20).37 The key to Quintilian’s call lies in his assertion
that we read “as if we were actually transcribing what we read.” The practice of reading works in tandem with writing-in-response to those readings.
By building on any effort to transcribe the work of another (the “already said”) into their own writings and within the context of their own questions, students will find themselves essaying in the meditative ways I’ve described in Chapter 4. The essays they produce, then, will not be the navel-gazing essays we are used to seeing in creative nonfiction courses. Instead of “pursu[ing] the unspeakable,” “reveal[ing] the hidden,” or “say[ing] the unsaid,” as Foucault characterizes the work of confessionary writing (like the contemporary personal essay), the self writing essay is an attempt at “captur[ing] the already said,” “col- lect[ing] what one has managed to hear of read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self” (“Self-Writing” 211).38
To help students into this very different relationship with texts, I require my students to keep an Annotation Notebook, which is a variation of the hupom-
nēmata, meant to enable a reading-writing connection, which in turn enables the “shaping of the self.” This practice serves as the foundation for the work they will do throughout the semester. I begin my self writing course with Longinus’s On the Sublime, and after the first class discussion of the first ten pages of the text, I assign the Annotation Notebook. Here is a copy of the Annotation Note- book Assignment:
Directions: Please annotate the readings due for each class pe- riod in your Annotation Notebooks, following the guidelines below. Tasks numbered 1-3 can be addressed in any order you wish.
1. List key concepts, and as best you can, define them. 2. Explain, in your own words, the major question that
the writer is exploring.
3. List key claims regarding that question (e.g., claims that answer, frame/contextualize, or complicate the question).
4. Note any insights in the text that you find to be interesting (e.g., insights that are compelling, curi- ous, infuriating) in the following way: first, copy the passage in which you encountered the insight; then, reflect on the insight in one of two ways—by simply jotting a quick “note to self” about why it’s interest- ing, or by freewriting in response to the passage. I should see at least one freewrite to one insight in each notebook entry.
In class, we use tasks 1-3 to guide the first half of the class period’s discussion. In the first week or two, I stick to that guide closely. Only when I am sure that the students are grasping the key concepts, major question(s), etc., in each of the texts, will I move away from this format and begin class, instead, by unpacking a few of the denser or more problematic passages that I’ve selected. In addition, for the first couple of weeks with any text, we shift in the last half of class to task number four in their notebooks, and it is here that I see most clearly the creation of a relationship of oneself to oneself in my students’ work.
For example, in Chapter 3 of On the Sublime, Longinus argues that false sentiment is one kind of writing defect that “militate[s] against sublimity.” He states, “[false sentiment] is hollow emotionalism where emotion is not called for, or immoderate passion where restraint is what is needed. For writers are often
carried away, as though by drunkennesss, in outbursts of emotion which are not relevant to the matter in hand, but are wholly personal, and hence tedious” (103). A few semesters ago, a student in one of my self writing courses wrote about this insight repeatedly in her Annotation Notebook, returning to it again and again, even as we moved to other texts that were investigating different concerns. In her final essay for the course, Longinus’s insight served as material for an extended meditation in which she arrived at a new insight about her own artistic work. Specifically, this student turned her attention to her experiences with a painting she had created in the past and had shown in a local coffee shop, a painting that had frustrated her so much that she eventually took it back from the shop and stashed it under her bed, where it still sat, because she found that though she had created it in a fit of despair, it was consistently read by audiences as a symbol of hope. In her extended meditation, she eventually found that she had failed to convey the proper emotion because of the wholly personal and im- moderately passionate conveyance of emotion and that her audience’s inability to read the proper emotion in it felt like a betrayal, not only by that audience but by the art and by her self, as an artist.
I read this extended meditation as an example of one writer working in re- lation to her self on the page, through the truth test and the unification prac- tices of self writing. Basically, she tested and integrated the “truth” forwarded by Longinus in regards to her own work, negotiating conceptions of her self-as- artist and her self-as-feeling, among others. Though she was working through a question (“why did the piece fail?”), the meditation served not only as a practice through which she could think-on-the-page, but it also served as a practice in which that self-on-the-page spoke back to her, as insight gave way to insight and relation to relation, until she came away from the exercise with a different sense of her self—as artist, as writer, as feeling-person.
I should note that I only discuss the “self-to-self” relation with my students in conceptual terms before they begin to draft their essays. I find that the con- cept is a tangle for them and only seems to confuse their writing processes, until they have generated an extended meditation which they, then, can engage and revise. At that point, they are able to recall and to experience the self-to-self re- lation that Foucault describes. Too, they are able to reflect on it in their journals (in which I ask them to freewrite each day at the end of class). In the end, many of my students have commented that it felt as though they met another self in writing—a self that may have been, in turns, fearful and tentative, thoughtful and capable. They often tell me that they believe they became stronger writers for it. I have always found that I have had to agree them.
I firmly believe that much of that strength comes, too, from my working to push these students beyond the limits I mentioned earlier and from them
working so hard to reach beyond those limits. As I’ve explained, I push them, in part, by asking them to engage with difficult texts, like Longinus’s On the Sub- lime. Admittedly, over the years, I’ve had colleagues advise me not to teach the philosophers, scholars, and essayists I love because, according to my colleagues, the teaching will spoil that love in failing to transfer to my students. I think I have felt that frustration before, though only with particular students who, in my most arrogant and dangerous moments, I believed could be helped or healed by reading a particular text. For the most part, I don’t experience that “spoiling,” though, and I suspect that this is because I include the Annotation Notebook and considerable (tough and demanding) debate in self writing courses. I’d love to sit in coffee shops and bars and debate with my peers the tenets of Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s and Derrida’s work, like I did as a graduate student, but now, as I see it, my job is to carry that work into the classroom. This is what my graduate school professors did for me; I do it, now, for my students, graduate and under- graduate, alike.
Again, debate looks very different in a lower-level writing course than it does in an upper-level essay course, but my point here is to say that we don’t have to be afraid for ourselves or for our students in bringing difficult and even our most-loved texts into the course; in fact, I think we limit our students’ develop- ment, as thinkers and writers, when we deprive them of such experiences. My upper-level essay students are, quite simply, exhilarating (and often exhilarated) in their engagement with difficult texts, and I’ll note that I don’t teach at an ivy league or Research 1 university. My very positive experience is, in part, due to the fact that my colleagues do an excellent job training our students to read closely and thoughtfully (one of the great benefits of working in an English department). As one of only two Rhetoric and Composition Ph.D.s in our de- partment, it then falls to me to teach our students to write beyond formulas. By the time I see them in an upper-level essay course, they are, I find, well trained, but perhaps too well trained—they are good at reading closely, good at writing in formulas, and they have come to accept that they cannot do anything else as good English majors and/or writing minors.
I believe—and I will provide evidence in this chapter of the fact—that stu- dents are fully capable of working productively with texts that continue to con- found and frustrate, as well as entice and inspire, the very best scholars writing in the Humanities today. I dwell on this point at length here because I have found that it is only through this level of intensity in engaging with texts that students can practice self writing. In working with a group of upper-level essay students who know the value of exploration and who are beginning to believe that they, too, can interpret the work and make it do some work for them, the dense text begins to open itself. If they haven’t already experienced it, self writing students
come to know the depth of that experience: how our engagement with a text can reshape us; how that engagement is a process of frustration and pleasure, of confusion and realization; how that engagement draws us together, as a class, and how it becomes deeply personal and private, even as we are working togeth- er; how that engagement makes us feel stupid and brilliant in turns; and how, in the end, working with such texts is like learning to build a boat with what sometimes feels like a plethora of nails and no hammer—until we’ve figured out how to make a hammer from the exercise itself.
Some of the texts I’ve used in these courses have been Longinus’s On the Sublime, Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” his Genealogy of Morals, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Ecce Homo. I’ve used Rich- ard Miller’s Writing at the End of the World and Laura Kipnis’s Against Love. In the next self writing course I teach, I will incorporate works by Kenneth Burke. I use texts that confound me, but that I’ve also found to be revelations in each reading. With each of these texts, I find myself saying to my students, “Here’s something about which I have no idea what to think. What do you think of it?” It is in such moments, too, that I often reach back into my writing training to a perhaps surprising exercise—the freewrite.
I typically ask students to freewrite when I anticipate that they will have strong feelings/beliefs about an issue—e.g., when Nietzsche claims that God is dead in The Gay Science. I ask for them to freewrite when I have a question I can’t yet begin to formulate for them for discussion—e.g., something about Miller’s insight into how we internalize socially sanctioned moralities and how Kipnis’s polemic fails to undo that internalization, because of something about the internalization process, itself. Or, I ask them to freewrite when I feel like we’ve gotten too far away from their essays and I want them to have a chance to trace connections. As a rule, I don’t grade freewrites. I tell students that if they’d like me to see the freewrites, then they may turn them in; however, the freewrites are only intended to help students to consider claims, to test ideas, to draw con- nections. Too, as I mentioned above, in the freewrite, they have the opportunity to address and acknowledge their initial emotional responses to what are often polemical statements, which I believe is essential to their success in the course. If they have a strong emotional response, there must be a safe space for them to articulate it—and to work their way through it.
I have found that the freewrite is so useful to the self writing course that I require all of us, including myself, to keep Freewriting Journals and to write in them at least once during each class meeting. As such, this is another way, like